Pestilence

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

Hilary rose at six a.m. Her night had been undisturbed by further telephone calls, so she assumed that the two boys she’d treated the previous night were either improving, or at least their symptoms had grown no worse during the hours of darkness. She washed her hair and was grateful that she’d bought the new electric hairdryer from a department store in Ashford before moving to Olney. There were no such luxuries available in the Olney St. Mary general store, the only retail establishment in the village apart from a small newsagent which was located adjacent to Bradley’s garage. The dryer was noisy but effective, and her hair was dry in minutes.

Downstairs, she filled the kettle and placed it on the gas hob in the kitchen. While it boiled, she prepared her usual bowl of cornflakes, sprinkled with a dusting of sugar. She sat down to her breakfast and had almost finished the cornflakes when the kettle began its cheery whistle on the stove to inform her that the water had boiled. Hilary poured the boiling water onto the tea leaves which were waiting in the bottom of the tea pot, and two minutes later she poured herself a delicious cup of her favourite morning tea.

She made her way back upstairs to her bedroom, pausing long enough on the upstairs landing to peep into her spare bedroom, which currently acted as a repository for her as yet unpacked belongings, still stored in boxes on the floor. The room also contained the remaining items that had belonged to the late Dr. Meddings. They would be collected by his niece at some date in the near future, or so Hilary had been informed. She made a mental note to start sorting out her things very soon. She had yet to totally personalise the cottage which housed her surgery. It was of a decent size, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and three living rooms downstairs, one of which acted as her waiting room, another doubling as the consulting room which contained all the medical paraphernalia associated with a doctor’s place of work, down to the skeleton hanging on a metal frame in one corner of the room. Hilary had noticed that the skeleton was positioned in such a way that it appeared to be ‘looking’ at the eye test chart which was tacked to the wall directly opposite its location. More than anything, the rent on the cottage surgery was cheap by the standards of the day, just five pounds a week, and Hilary had been only too pleased to accept the position of general practitioner in the village of Olney. Where better to begin one’s solo career as a G.P.?

In her room once more she dressed for the day ahead. Knowing that she would soon be visiting Birtles Farm once more, she decided to forego her usual formal attire for the morning surgery. Leaving her dress and jacket on their hangers in the wardrobe, she instead selected a beige polo necked sweater and a pair of tan trousers and topped the ensemble off with a pale brown cardigan. She extracted a pair of as yet unused green wellington boots from the bottom of her wardrobe. She’d change into them at the farm. She applied a hint of eye shadow and lipstick and checked her appearance in the mirror which stood on a swivelling stand on the dressing table. She’d do!

Morning surgery began at eight thirty, and when Hilary peered into the waiting room, she saw that she had only two patients waiting to take advantage of her professional services. Seventy-year-old Mrs. Eileen Docherty had been to see Hilary the previous week. Doubtless she required further reassurance that her arthritis wasn’t about to lead her sudden demise. The second person waiting was equally as old as Mrs. Docherty, but the lady was unknown to Hilary. She’d soon find out her name of course once surgery began.

Hilary nodded and said a cheerful “Good morning” to her patients and went through the waiting room into her consulting room. She’d barely sat down in her chair behind the old mahogany desk when the phone began its infernal jangling.

“Doctor Newton,” she answered.

“It’s Sam Bradley, Doctor Newton. I know you said you’d be calling after your surgery finished but I think you should come right now if possible.”

“Is David worse, Mr. Bradley?”

“Yes Doctor, he is. He seemed OK all through the night, and then this morning he started to complain that the pains in his muscles were getting worse. He can’t stop shivering, though his body is red hot to the touch, and he’s developed a cough that sounds as though his lungs are full of liquid. We’re very worried; please can you come straight away? His mother is frantic with fear.”

The mother wasn’t the only one, thought Hilary. She could sense the man’s fear as she listened to him describing the boy’s symptoms.

“I’ll be right there Mr. Bradley. Tell your wife not to panic. I’m sure we’ll soon have David stabilised. It might just be a case of his fever breaking, a crisis point after which his temperature will begin to fall, and he’ll start his recovery.”

Even as she spoke the words, Hilary herself feared that she may have been wrong in her initial diagnosis of young David Bradley, but if she had been, then what could be causing his symptoms? He’d shown all the classic hallmarks of a bad case of influenza the night before, but the cough and strange sounds coming from his lungs worried her more she dared let on to the boy’s father.

“OK Doctor, and thank you.” said the garage owner as he hung up the phone on her. Whether he trusted her or not Hilary couldn’t be sure, but Sam Bradley knew that at that point in time Hilary Newton was the only option open to him in his efforts to make his son well again.

“I’m sorry ladies, but I have to leave to attend an emergency. Can I ask you to come back and attend the evening surgery?”

The two elderly ladies in the waiting room looked aghast as Hilary breezed into the room with her black bag in hand.

“But, what about my arthritis?” asked old Mrs. Docherty, “And Mrs. Henshaw here is having terrible trouble with her varicose veins.”

At least Hilary now knew the name of the mystery patient.

“Look ladies, I really am deeply sorry, but I have a very sick young boy to attend to and I must go, now! Please come back later.”

Hilary Newton didn’t look back as she exited the surgery door. She knew that she’d probably done irreparable damage to her relationship with two of her elderly patients, but varicose veins and arthritis could wait. By the sound of his father’s phone call, David Bradley’s problems couldn’t. After she’d gone the two old ladies sat dumbfounded in the waiting room for a few minutes before rising to leave. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before. Eileen Docherty remarked to her lifelong friend Polly Henshaw that.

“This would never have happened if they’d sent us a man to replace Doctor Meddings. You just can’t trust these young girls to be as professional as a man, that’s what I say.”

“Quite right, Eileen. Who ever let women become doctors anyway? Doctoring is man’s work, that’s what it is. So much for the b****y National Health Service.”

It quite escaped the two women that they both shared the same gender as the young woman they were so intent on maligning. Mind you, they would have probably said “That’s different”, if pressed on the matter; such was the mindset of their generation.

As the two walked down the street towards their respective homes Eileen Docherty shouted to her friend as they parted.

“It was the war, Polly, that’s what did it. Not enough men, so they let these slips of girls do a bit of training and now they can call themselves doctors.”

Her friend nodded and waved, and the two women were soon ensconced in their cosy cottages brewing tea and bemoaning the fact that of all things, they had a woman doctor to contend with in Olney St. Mary.

When she arrived at the Bradley house, Hilary was shown straight up to David’s sick room by his worried looking father. One look at the patient was enough to tell Hilary that she was now dealing with a terribly ailing young man. Beads of sweat were dotted on his brow, though the boy was shivering as though chilled to the bone. When she took his temperature, she found it had risen by one degree from the previous night, but the thing that worried Hilary most of all was the cough. It was as his father had described on the phone. The boy had developed a ‘liquid’ cough that spoke of massive lung congestion.

“Look, Doctor.”

The boy’s mother held a towel out in Hilary’s direction. She could see flecks of blood on it.

“He started to cough it up a few minutes ago, and he says he feels dizzy.”

The young doctor was now seriously worried about her patient. His rapid deterioration indicated to Hilary that the boy was suffering from something rather more serious than influenza, though what it could be she felt unable to decipher at the time. She could discount bronchitis, pneumonia and a whole raft of other diseases or infections affecting the lungs and the bronchial tract as his symptoms were far more radical than would be found in any of those. Being able to eliminate the things that it couldn’t be was all very well, but none of that helped her in diagnosing the true nature of what ailed young David Bradley.

As she watched it became obvious that the boy’s breathing was becoming more laboured. He coughed again, and blood spattered the bedclothes. Hilary needed to think quickly. Her options were extremely limited. Should she continue to treat the boy ‘blind’ in the hope that she could discover the cause of his illness and apply a cure, or should she call for an ambulance and have David admitted to hospital in Ashford forty miles away? At least there the doctors could administer the necessary clinical and pathological tests to determine the nature of David’s illness.

“May I use your telephone please, Mr. Bradley?” she asked. “I’d like to speak to someone at the hospital in Ashford to determine whether we should admit David for tests.”

“Do you really think that’s necessary Doctor, to admit him to hospital I mean?”

“It may be the best thing for David, Mr. Bradley, and until I can be absolutely certain what it is we’re dealing with here I’d rather not take any chances with your son’s health.”

Emily Bradley, sitting in a chair beside her son’s bed looked imploringly at her husband.

“Sam, let the doctor send him to hospital if she thinks it’s for the best. We just want David to get well again, don’t we, son?” she directed her last words to young David as she clutched the boy’s hand reassuringly.

David appeared almost too feeble to speak, and merely nodded weakly at his mother.

“Do whatever you think necessary, Doctor,” said Bradley.

Five minutes later Hilary was connected to Doctor Paul Trent, a consultant and a specialist in respiratory diseases at the Ashford General Hospital.

“I don’t like the sound of it, Hilary,” said Trent, who’d known Hilary from her days as a junior house doctor at the hospital, after hearing her full description of David Bradley’s symptoms.

“It sounds too virulent and far too fast in its physical attack on the boy’s system to be a simple case of the flu. Listen, I’ll arrange for an ambulance to get over to Olney St. Mary right away. You have the boy ready when it gets there, and we’ll have him admitted for in depth tests to try to ascertain what’s causing this.”

“I forgot to mention that I have a second case Paul.”

“What?”

“Yes, another boy, similar age, the two patients are best friends, rarely apart apparently. I’m going to visit him as soon as I can make David comfortable here. I’m hoping that he hasn’t deteriorated in the night as well.”

“Look Hilary, whatever this is, I think you ought to prepare the other boy’s parents as well. Tell them that we might need to have their son transferred here to Ashford along with the other boy. Do the second patient’s parents have a telephone?”

“Yes, and it’s the grandparents actually.”

“Very good. Here’s what I want you to do. If the second boy is as poorly as the first one when you get there, you ring the Bradley house and tell them to direct the ambulance to wherever the second patient is. I’ll make sure the ambulance crew are aware that they might have a second pick up to make.”

“Thanks Paul, I appreciate your help.”

“Don’t give it another thought Hilary. If you’ve got something nasty in the air around that picturesque little village of yours then we’d best find out and deal with it sooner rather than later, don’t you think?”

“Of course. I don’t want to start losing patients when I’ve hardly got my feet under the table in the village, do I?”

“Exactly. Now, off with you and attend to your patients, Doctor. I’m going to get that ambulance on its way to you.”

“OK, Paul. Like I said, thank you.”

Evan Parkes was, if anything, in a far worse condition than David Bradley when Hilary arrived at the farm. It took her less than a minute to decide that he too should be sent to the hospital in Ashford. She used the Parkes’ telephone to call the Bradley house and instructed Sam Bradley to direct the ambulance crew to Birtles Farm after they had safely loaded David into the ambulance.

Two hours later Hilary waved the ambulance away from the farm with her two young patients aboard. She hoped that it wouldn’t take Paul Trent too long to isolate and identify the cause of the two boy’s illness. Unfortunately, events were about to take a turn for the worse.

When the telephone rang in her office ninety minutes later, she rushed to answer it, assuming it to be Doctor Trent with an initial report on the boy’s arrival at the hospital. It was indeed Trent on the phone, but the news he had to relate to her was of the worst possible kind.

“Hilary, I’m sorry,” he said, “but Even Parkes died in the ambulance on the way here. David Bradley is hanging on, but I must warn you, it doesn’t look good for him either. I need to work fast to try to find out what the hell this is, so please, I need to go. I’ll call you when I have more news.”

“Yes, right Paul. Thank you,” Hilary spoke into the mouthpiece, but Trent was already gone.

She sat in her chair for over twenty minutes, unable to comprehend what had happened. Two young boys, healthy and fit up until a couple of days ago had suddenly been struck down by something she had been unable to identify or treat. Now, one was dead and another close to death if Trent’s words were accurate.

Eventually, Hilary Newton rose from her chair and took a deep breath. Whether she liked it or not, and with no real idea of what she was going to say, she made her way to the door. She had a terrible and unwanted visit to make.